'Porn Advocate at DOJ' - a Bright Spot for Obama

This column by Janet M. LaRue, general counsel at Concerned Women for America, aims to alarm us about David Ogden, President Obama's choice for deputy attorney general. Instead it makes Ogden sound like a vigorous defender of the First Amendment and one of Obama's best nominees. Here are the particulars of LaRue's indictment:

-- Challenged the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988 and the Child Protection Restoration and Penalties Enhancement Act of 1990. Ogden argued that requiring porn producers to personally verify that their models were over age 18 would "burden too heavily and infringe too deeply on the right to produce First Amendment-protected material."

These all seem to me like marks in Ogden's favor, even that last case. I assume he was arguing for an objective definition of child pornography, as opposed to one that can transform harmless, unobjectionable images into proscribable material based on the thoughts of the people viewing them.

At his confirmation hearing last week, Ogden distinguished between his role as an advocate for clients such as Playboy and his role as a Justice Department official, saying he would not hesitate to enforce laws that have been upheld by the courts even if he had challenged their constitutionality as a lawyer. He acknowledged the legitimacy of laws aimed at pornography involving minors and apologized for mocking social conservatives in a memo he wrote as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. But he did not repudiate his opposition to policies that impinge on the First Amendment rights of adults in the name of protecting children.

Last fall I considered the pornography record of Ogden's new boss, Eric Holder. In the February issue of Reason, I drew parallels between obscenity and drug paraphernalia prosecutions and predicted that neither would be a big priority in the Obama administration.